Corruption Chronicles: Lobbyists Gone Wild

Neither of these is particularly new news, but worth lumping together. Emphasis mine, first from the San Antonio Express-News:

Texas Democrats on Wednesday called for Gov. Rick Perry to cancel a $180,000-a-year state lobby contract they contend was used to funnel taxpayer money into Republican campaigns.

Perry's office called the allegations a "baseless, partisan move" and defended the contracts as nonpartisan.

Drew Maloney, a former chief of staff to embattled Rep. Tom DeLay, was one of two lobbyists hired by the Texas Office of State-Federal Relations in 2003 to represent Texas interests in the nation's capital. Once awarded the contract, Maloney made more than $75,000 in contributions to Republican campaigns, both nationally and in Texas.

"It's unbelievable to find, in effect, laundering taxpayer money to put in the coffers of Republican politicians in the state of Texas," said Democratic Texas Rep. Jim Dunnam. "It's an outrage, and it's unbelievable."

The Republican-led Texas Legislature approved spending $1.1 million on the contracts, despite repeated attempts by Democrats to redirect the money into state programs. The contracts expire in 2007.

"Gov. Perry should not continue to waste huge sums of taxpayer money to fund the unnecessary lobby contract of another man who is directly involved in the unseemly activities of Tom DeLay," Dunnam said. "Why do we spend $1.1 million state tax dollars on lobbyists when Texas is home to 32 congressmen and women, two senators and the president of the United States?"

The state lobbyists have helped the state secure more federal money for state programs, said Perry spokeswoman Rachel Novier. "We're getting a really good return on our investments for the dollars that we spend for the Office of State-Federal Relations and for advocating on behalf of Texas in Washington," she said.

Maloney, who could not be reached for comment, is employed by the Washington lobby firm the Federalist Group, which he joined in 2002 "to serve as the chief lobbyist for House Republican Leadership," the group's Web site says. (He was also) a key figure in 2002 fundraising that has led to criminal charges against DeLay and two of his associates, who are accused of using restricted corporate money in Texas campaigns.

Another lobbyist in the office, Todd Boulanger, once worked closely with confessed influence peddler Jack Abramoff. Boulanger has a $330,000 contract with the state.

There's also this, from Harvey Kronberg's Quorum Report Executive Summary of 1/13/06 (emphasis his) :

Today, the Texas Democratic Party Chairman Charles Soechting joined a number of non-partisan organizations in calling for bankrupt lobbyist Bill Ceverha to immediately resign his position on the Employee Retirement System (ERS) Board. Ceverha, who was found to have violated state law in his role as Treasurer for Tom DeLay's Texans for a Republican Majority (TRMPAC), was appointed to the ERS Board by Texas House Speaker Tom Craddick, the primary beneficiary of the illegal TRMPAC-Delay 2002 campaign effort.

“If you told friends or co-workers that a bankrupt lobbyist who has violated state campaign finance laws was sitting on the board that oversees a $20 billion retirement fund, they’d say that was nuts,” said Texas Democratic Party Chairman Charles Soechting.

Is this a simple culture of corruption, or has the culture grown out of the petri dish, spread out across the table, and in fact consumed the entire science laboratory?

There was a movie in the Sixties called The Green Slime that this latest episode of the Corruption Chronicles reminds me of.

Wes Clark coming to Texas this month

Eddie at The Red State breaks the news:

Gen. Wesley Clark, former presidential candidate and NATO's Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, will be in Corpus Christi, TX on January 26, 2006 to announce his support for Juan Garcia's race (campaign website) for Texas House District 32.

As previously suggested here (and Evan deduced it) Clark will probably make an appearance with Bob Gammage on this trip, though a specific stop in Houston isn't yet confirmed.

Update (1/18): That didn't take long ...

Please join
Arthur Gochman, Molly Gochman,
Don Riddle and Greater Houston Area Friends of Bob Gammage

as we welcome

General Wesley Clark

to Houston!

Thursday, January 26th, 2006 for a fundraising reception for

Bob Gammage for Governor

1:00 pm, Hotel Derek, 2525 West Loop South, Houston

Suggested Contribution Levels:

$1000 Host, $500 Patron, $250 Gold Founder, $100 Silver Founder, $50 Friend

H-Town lefty blogger's luncheon

I'm under the weather again this week so I'm late in posting a wrap-up of our monthly get-together.

This month's soiree last Friday featured a few first-timers you may have heard of: Hubert Vo, Scott Hochberg, and Joe Jaworski.

Melissa Noriega (wife of Rick), Karen Loper, a longtime pol around these parts, and Katie Floyd from the Radnofsky campaign -- along with the usual online suspects -- made an appearance. Jim Dallas of BOR also showed up early and stayed late.

These are organized by Charles Kuffner, who also has a post today pointing out the shortfalls in the Chronic's political coverage. It must be getting embarrassing for the Leading Information Source to be scooped on a regular basis by us bloglodytes.

They link to us (well, me at least) on almost a weekly basis through this page, so I know they're reading. It would be nice to see them keep up with us once in awhile.

To honor Dr. King today

Here is some prescient advice he gave us nearly 40 years ago:

"We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, militarism, and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered. A nation can flounder as readily in the face of moral and spiritual bankruptcy as it can through financial bankruptcy."

That's from his speech entitled Beyond Vietnam, which he delivered in April of 1967. You can hear excerpts of other speeches in his own voice by clicking here (broadband and Flash necessary) and you may read the full transcript of Beyond Vietnam and hear additional excerpts of it here.

Another favorite (this one is a little unsettling in light of the current state of world affairs; spoken at Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church also in 1967):

"Don't let anybody make you think that God chose America as his divine messianic force to be a sort of policeman for the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment and it seems that I can hear God saying to America, 'You are too arrogant. If you don't change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power, and I will place it in the hands of a nation that doesn't even know my name.'"

If you have any favorite quotations of Dr. King, please post them in the comments.

MLK Day Parade in Houston is a long-running feud

Last week, the Harris County Democratic Party managed to negotiate itself into participating in today's Martin Luther King Day Parade in downtown Houston.

Here you can read about the terms of the "agreement". It would be important to note that without these terms, the HCDP would have been disallowed from participating.

Well, late yesterday, the Democrats were uninvited anyway.

It probably has nothing at all to do with the fractious rivalry that's been going on for ten years between competing supporters.

But it's a big stinking mess, nevertheless. And I hope we find out more about the backstory, so this dirty laundry can get cleaned soon.

Cheney: Katrina was "a distraction"

Don't you just hate it when your nation's citizens start inconveniently dying as a result of a natural disaster when you're trying to focus on killing the citizens of another country?

In an interview with U.S. News, Cheney said, "You do have to keep a sustained campaign going. There's no question about it. Last fall, obviously, there were a lot of other items on the agenda. We went through the whole exercise with Katrina and the hurricanes and disaster relief and so forth that was, I suppose, a bit of a distraction. But it is important to try to maintain public support for what we're doing out there."

Here's the Moneyshot Quote.

Arlen Specter thinks Bush should be impeached

He just won't come right out and say so. Of course, Arlen Specter also claims to be pro-choice, and has said he will vote for Scalito the Woman-Hater.

Here's what the senator from Pennsylvania said. I wonder if he really means it:

STEPHANOPOULOS: There was a lot of talk about that at the Alito hearings, and listening closely to you I certainly seem to take away that you believe the president does not have the right, does not have the inherent power under the Constitution to circumvent a constitutional law, and as far as you are concerned, the FISA law is constitutional, isn’t it?

SPECTER: Well, I started off by saying that he didn’t have the authority under the resolution authorizing the use of force. The president has to follow the Constitution. Where you have a law which is constitutional, like Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, there still may be collateral different powers in the president under wartime circumstances.

That’s a very knotty question that I’m not prepared to answer on a Sunday soundbite. But I do believe that it ought to be thoroughly examined. And when we were on the Patriot Act and found the disclosure of the surveillance, I immediately said the Judiciary Committee would hold hearings, and I talked to the attorney general, and we’re going to explore it in depth, George. You can count on that.

STEPHANOPOULOS: You know, if the president did break the law or circumvent the law, what’s the remedy?

SPECTER: Well, the remedy could be a variety of things. A president — and I’m not suggesting remotely that there’s any basis, but you’re asking, really, theory, what’s the remedy? Impeachment is a remedy. After impeachment, you could have a criminal prosecution, but the principal remedy, George, under our society is to pay a political price.

To be clear, Specter did stammer a lot through that last bit.

"The President is not entitled to his nominee"

Bravo, georgia10:

The mantra that "a President is entitled to his nominee" will be repeated many times as Senators decide how to cast their votes. The premise stems from the notion that it is he who has a vested appointment power, and that the Senate should accord the President a high degree of deference when he makes he choice.

The question is this: Does this theory of entitlement prevail when the President has abused the trust of the American people?

Here is a president who has misled our nation into war, abrogated the laws duly enacted by Congress, and violated our constitutional and civil rights. He's drudged through scandal after scandal, but has yet to be held accountable. Where is Phase II of the pre-war intelligence investigation? Where is the outrage over the fact he nullified Congress' ban on torture? He violated his oath to protect the Constitution when he issued his royal edict to spy on us outside the law. Yet who will hold him responsible? A Republican Congress?

The president, exhibiting the theory of the unitary executive that Alito endorses, has snubbed the legislative and judicial branches of government and has declared himself above the law. And now, Senators will claim with straight face that he is entitled to his nominee?

The man is entitled to nothing from the Congress he has abused and misled. The man is entitled to nothing from the American people he has betrayed. It is us, the citizens of this country, who are entitled to the truth. And until we receive that truth, this nominee should not pass.

(standing and applauding)

Read all of it.

Update (1/15): This is strikingly blunt:

Mr. Bush, however, seems to see no limit to his imperial presidency. First, he issued a constitutionally ludicrous "signing statement" on the McCain bill. The message: Whatever Congress intended the law to say, he intended to ignore it on the pretext the commander in chief is above the law. That twisted reasoning is what led to the legalized torture policies, not to mention the domestic spying program.

Then Mr. Bush went after the judiciary, scrapping the Levin-Graham bargain. (...)

Both of the offensive theories at work here - that a president's intent in signing a bill trumps the intent of Congress in writing it, and that a president can claim power without restriction or supervision by the courts or Congress - are pet theories of Judge Samuel Alito, the man Mr. Bush chose to tilt the Supreme Court to the right.

The administration's behavior shows how high and immediate the stakes are in the Alito nomination, and how urgent it is for Congress to curtail Mr. Bush's expansion of power. Nothing in the national consensus to combat terrorism after 9/11 envisioned the unilateral rewriting of more than 200 years of tradition and law by one president embarked on an ideological crusade.

Samuel Alito as "Diamond Jim" Brady

Overcowded Texas prisons put us at greater risk

Scott at Grits (hey, he likes carbs, I prefer protein) has an excellent post up about the crisis of overcowded prisons in Texas, and why that is a bad thing particularly for our safety. Go read the piece; here's an excerpt:

From the time Texas revolted against Mexico in 1836 until Ronald Reagan became president, the number of Texas prison beds grew from zero to a little less than 30,000. In the next 25 years, that number increased five-fold to more than 150,000, and the majority of new inmates were non-violent offenders. Even that rate of increase, though, can't keep up with new prison entries stemming from the Legislature's penchant for passing so-called penalty "enhancements" that don't take into account financial costs. We are at a crisis point -- the status quo is untenable.

The best way out of this imbroglio would be to follow the advice of one of my past campaign clients, former House Corrections Committee Chairman Ray Allen (R-Grand Prairie - he's sadly retiring from the Lege this year), who is fond of saying Texas should imprison only people "who we're afraid of, not those we're only mad at."

Update (1/14): Scott adds to his discussion by linking and commenting on a post at Houston Strategies.

Bell and Gammage and choice

Quite the brouhaha has broken out over Chris Bell's release of an endorsement letter from prominent Texans who support a woman's unfettered right to choose. The campaign blog also has posted Bob Gammage's voting record, to which the letter refers.

Burnt Orange Report has had the most to say about it so far; there's a conversation going on here as well.

I've made my thoughts pretty clear already at both of those places, so no need to repeat them here. Suffice it to say that you'll be reading and hearing more about this today.

Maybe my contributions and linkage will finally convince Karl-T to add me to his blogroll.

Update (1/15): Gammage clarifies:

(Gammage) reaffirmed his support for abortion rights and raising the minimum wage, despite what the Bell campaign said were contradictions in Gammage's voting record while in Congress in the 1970s.

"I've cast a lot of votes ... over the 25 years I was in public service. I wish I could look back on that record of service and say, 'I never made a mistake,' " he told reporters.

Gammage, who last held office in 1995, also is a former state legislator and a former Texas Supreme Court justice.

He said he strongly supports a woman's right to an abortion and always has, despite several votes in 1977 and 1978 against federal funding of abortions. "The question as we saw it at the time was not whether a woman should have the right to choose but who should pay once that choice was made. Today, I wouldn't vote that way," he said.

Samuel Alito as Eddie Haskell

I participated in a conference call on the Alito hearings last night with Ralph Neas of PFAW and Nancy Keenan of NARAL and Chris Bowers of MyDD and Armando from Kos (It wasn’t that I am so important; there were a few hundred other bloggers of significantly higher profile than yours truly). Much was cussed and discussed, but the gist of it was that we couldn’t decide if the Supreme Court justice nominee was a Robert Bork lover, or Bork reincarnated, or just a run-of-the-mill FReeper.

I have come to the conclusion that Samuel Alito is actually Eddie Haskell.

He’ll say anything to get what he wants, especially a job; he'll suck up to the boss like it’s going out of style, and he'll act innocent, pretend it never happened or deny it all when he’s caught (sucking up or lying, whichever it is).

A conflicted, insecure, ass-kissing nerd and total creep. Alito is the kind of guy who was afraid of having women at Princeton, a guy so misogynistic and intoxicated with authority that he ruled that a ten-year-old girl could be stripsearched without a warrant. The kinda guy on record as saying Bork was the greatest, a guy who says he’ll recuse himself from cases where he has a conflict of interest and then doesn’t, a guy who favors unlimited dictatorial powers for Bush -- a bitter, confused, misguided, frustrated failure who will have a chip on his shoulder and an axe to grind for the rest of his life if he gets on the Supreme Court.

"It's all about character" -- and as Digby's post above shows, Alito's character is a pile of steaming horseshit.

If there ever was a time for Democratic (and moderate Republican) Senators to stand up and speak up, it is now. Alito must be filibustered. The GOP is reeling right now, barely hanging onto the ropes from the repeated barrage of all their scandals and crimes. All their so-called "wins" are turning out to be losses, where they rigged the game and bribed the refs in order to make it look like they won. And it's all starting to crumble now. They're weak and on the run and they're making one last-ditch attempt to move their lackey into place for life.

Senators: you can stop Alito. If you filibuster and Congress shuts down, most Americans will support you. Rove is going to be indicted, Abramoff is going to sing like a canary, and six months from now half the Republicans in Washington could be in court or in jail.

Drag this confirmation out until the fall when we just might have a legitimate government again -- instead of this dictatorship of desperate delinquents.

You have the power. Use it.